The well-regarded ethicist Stanley Hauerwas reviews a new book by John Milibank, of “radical orthodoxy” fame. Entitled The Politics of Virtue, Milibank argues that both today’s liberals and conservatives are essentially liberals. Both sides are fixated on “freedom,” whether sexual freedom or economic freedom, to the exclusion of other things needed for a good society (such as virtue). Milibanks goes on to argue for a “post-liberalism.”
Read Hauerwas’s discussion and interaction with the ideas after the jump.
From Stanley Hauerwas, Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life? What Liberals Should Learn from Shepherds – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):
Accordingly, with his co-author Adrian Pabst, he argues in The Politics of Virtue that our lives are shaped by narratives that make it almost impossible to be happy with the lives we have lived. Milbank and Pabst argue that people who are citizens of advanced societies, like the United States and the UK, cannot be satisfied with our lives because we no longer have the resources to live honourable lives of virtue. As a result, we seem to be living lives that are contradictory, or, as I have already suggested above, lives we do not understand.
According to Milbank and Pabst, we no longer are able to live virtuously because our lives are determined by a hegemonic liberal story. That story comes in two basic forms. There is the liberalism of the cultural left, which is primarily understood as the attempt to free people of past forms of oppression. That liberal story is often contrasted with the political and economic liberalism of the right that is primarily focused on economic and political policy within a capitalist framework.
Milbank and Pabst argue, however, that these forms of liberalism, though they have quite different understandings of freedom, have increasingly become mutually reinforcing. The left and the right are joined by the common project of increasing personal freedoms, even if the result is the atomization of our lives which makes impossible any account of our lives as having a narrative unity. Ironically, societies committed to securing the freedom of the individual end up making that same individual subject to impersonal bureaucratic procedures.
Politically liberalism increases the concentration of power in the central state, as well as at the same time underwriting the assumption of the inevitability of a globalized market. The latter has the unfortunate effect of destroying a sense of place. In such a social order, the production of wealth increasingly is in the hands of a new, rootless oligarchy “that practices a manipulative populism while holding in contempt the genuine priorities of most people”
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